Kodak 135 format 35mm Film
This is a Hasselblad XPan, a 35mm rangefinder camera that exposes 24mm x 65mm panoramic images on regular 35mm film. The Xpan was made in Japan and was a name variant of the Fujifilm TX-1. The Xpan was an extremely expensive and high quality camera with a focal plane shutter,…
This is a FED 2, a 35mm rangefinder camera made at the F. E. Dzerzhinsky Labour Commune in Kharkiv, Ukraine during the reign of the Soviet Union between the years 1955 and 1970. The FED 2 was an upgrade to the original FED camera which itself was a copy of…
This is a Mercury II Model CX half-frame 35mm camera made by the Universal Camera Company out of New York, NY. The Mercury II was an update to the original Mercury Model CC that added support for normal 35mm film rather than the proprietary Univex film used in the original. …
This is a Tenax II, an interchangeable lens 35mm rangefinder camera made by Zeiss-Ikon in Dresden starting in 1938. It shot 24mm x 24mm square images on regular 35mm film and was created by famed designer Hubert Nerwin who previously designed the Contax rangefinder. It was an unusually designed camera…
This is the Contarex, a professional grade 35mm SLR camera produced by Zeiss-Ikon starting in 1960. This first generation Contarex earned the nickname “Bullseye” for the large prominent circular exposure meter above the lens. The Contarex was one of the first West German SLRs with a focal plane shutter, and…
Another Halloween, another Cameras of the Dead article. This year, as I browsed through my ever growing collection of broken cameras, I started to see a pattern. While sure, I have my fair share of broken Japanese, American, and Soviet cameras, but I’m starting to see more and more European…
This is a Voigtländer Ultramatic CS, a 35mm SLR camera made by Voigtländer Braunschweig AG starting in 1965. The Ultramatic CS was the top of the line model in Voigtländer’s leaf shutter SLR lineup, starting with the lower cost Bessamatic. The Ultramatic CS was the first leaf shutter SLR with…
This is a Canon IV Sb 35mm rangefinder camera, produced by the Canon Camera Corporation of Tokyo, Japan starting in December 1952. The IV Sb was the world’s first 35mm camera to support flash sync for both flash bulbs and electronic X-sync through Canon’s proprietary rail mounted flash shoe. It…
This is a Minolta Super A, an interchangeable lens 35mm rangefinder made by Chiyoda Kogaku Seiko K.K. starting in 1957. The name Super A suggests it’s part of the Minolta A-series of cameras which first debuted in 1955. Unlike the other A-series cameras, the Super A is much larger and…
This is a Taron Chic, a vertical half frame 35mm scale focus camera made by Taron Company Limited of Tokyo Japan starting in 1961. The Chic shoots 18mm x 24mm “half-frame” exposures on regular 35mm film. Unlike most half frame 35mm cameras, the film transports vertically, rather than horizontally which…
This is the Asahi Pentax, the very first 35mm SLR produced by the Asahi Optical Company of Japan to use a pentaprism viewfinder. The camera is often referred to as the Pentax AP by collectors even though that was never officially documented. The other camera is the Asahi Pentax K,…
This is the Argus C-series. First released in 1938 as the Argus Model C, the C-series includes the best selling American camera ever made, the Argus C3. Over 2.2 million were produced over the course of 28 years, the C-series saw many subtle variations and incremental improvements, but generally retained…
